Storywriter

This column will focus mainly on bracketing and its application. Whilst I will relate it to our subbing processes you could use it for absolutely anything. It helps in any situation where you will have a number of people working on making edits and doing work to any common document. It is said that this form of noting and editing is used by the UN when working on documents.

It does not require any fancy applications nor does it really matter what you are accessing the document from. I first stumbled upon it whilst reading an article about it on Lifehacker. They linked to an article on Humanized that focused on it and just due to how simple but effective it was, I decided to try and get this used.

Now at first glance it may actually seem more complicated. You see a load of brackets all over the place and things inserted which make no sense. The beauty of it is that whilst it looks so, in reality it takes a few minutes to learn the idea/formula behind it and to start using it (as I found out when I linked Yume to the article). The articles I've linked to already do a really good job of explaining it all but I will run through one quick example from Okusama wa Majo and just talk about the process and how we used it.

So if we look at the whole process with a quick and simple example:

"Is she a rich families daughter?"

I took that line and came up with the following:

Is she a rich famil[ies][y's][] daughter?[][][Is she the daughter of a rich family?]

So our first bracket denotes something for deletion, the second bracket is for additions and the third is for comments.

So I wanted the "ies" part deleted, I wanted "y's" added in its place. There is no comment directly after the change but it is noted at the end (reason for this is below). The comment here is an alternative suggestion but it also serves as a clarification of the line. In some cases, you'll get a detailed explanation of something troubling you about a line and other times it's a quick note to clear things up (just so you know the train of thought at the time of suggestion). It really is as quick and simple as that.

A quick reason why, due to this being a fansub, things are broken line by line, Yume felt it would be easier for him to have comments right at the end of lines than in the middle. Otherwise in a document, that comment would be in that first set of brackets and the second set would not exist. The beauty is we were able to agree on this due to the nature of work and knowing the original rules but you can tailor it quickly and easily to your own needs.

In the past, Yume would have his file all sorted and send me a copy. I would then look at things and note them in a separate file and we would then discuss it later on for him to implement. This was a rather roundabout way of doing things and it was not the best thing to do in reality but it seemed the only way due to the control he likes over the scripts. Just due to how unwieldy it could get I refrained from making marks on his script, we'd just meet and discuss what I had done but things would have changed all over again and some of my notes would be out of date due to him correcting things or changing lines.

It's not a great way of doing things but we didn't know of much better ways. We took the script as being that and changes would be made by him as it was his script, I'd just note things and comment on those over IM.

The errors that we have noted in some of our earlier work has been due in large to this process. We'd work from separate scripts without really knowing easily what had been changed, how it had been changed and sometimes why such a change had been made. This confusion lead to some anger, confusion and disgust at what we were working on.

I think it was the lack of standard ways that caused us to follow such bizarre methods. We needed something that would always be drilled into us as to how to handle. I'm a little surprised at how we stuck with our original plan and would most likely still be working to that had we not stumbled on this. It seems so simple to implement but we were just travelling along blissfully unaware at how inefficient it all was. This may be something others have used for ages but with us starting from the beginning with no real experience on how others do things or see an insight into how they operate, it was quite a discovery and came at exactly the right time.

The joy of using this system was how much or little information we could place in each note but still have it followed easily. The original will still be there, the edits will co-exist in the original sentence and you can add in notes to explain how you feel or think about something. If I then ship this over to anyone else, they can cross-reference if they have worked on their own copy or they can continue to work on in the same file or just merge things to create a consolidated file.

It's a great little system that can be scaled for more people to use all at once or just used solely to track changes in any work you're doing. It lends itself amazingly well to fansubbing, probably more so than regular documents.

A little note, in the article I linked to on Humanize, there are some tools that will automatically purge brackets from your script/document and replace things as suggested i.e. if you have something that should be deleted it will do so and it will place any additions in as well. Can be handy for cleaning things up quickly without having to do each thing by manually.